rap is crap

Rap, first of all. And it isn't ever single kind of rap. It is the hard stuff. Gangsta rap. 6 hours is a long sleep. Longer than 3 hours on 14 hour work day - no music.

rap is the best thing there is
why do you want to talk **** about rap there is nothing wrong with it. it wasn't just made by ghetto ass kids. and what the **** is up with calling them ghetto. all rap is, is just a way for some people to get their feelings out. it takes time and effort to be able to rap not just any one can do it. so why don't you learn the facks before you start talking ****.

Werd, the facks yo.

Anyone seen the facks machine?

mainstream rap is kinda bogus but there is some really good older hip hop

de la soul - three feet high and rising is an awesome album

other good stuff, the jungle brothers, a tribe called quest, the avalanches, krs -one

hey djjd, welcome to a2k, cool to have ya. seems like you got a good taste in music.

tho i cant believe 'the people who grinned themselves to death' is one of your favorite all-time albums! lol.

(this is where i admit that i totally dug 'london 0 hull 4' when i was in high school ... it's a waste of time if you know what they mean / try shaking a box in front of the queen / flag day, flag day, flag day ... "take jesus - take marx - take hope", lol. i still think "happy hour" is just the coolest song.)

it's a close call between the two, but the people finds it's way into my stereo, walkman, car a little more often

Hello djjd62, welcome.

The Avalanches are brilliant. They broke up quite recently and will all probably have solo projects soon.

Krs-one is probably the best rapper going at the moment.

Aaaarrrrgghhhhh!!! I make it all the way to the end of the thread - and someone's finally mentioned De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. Need to add The Dream Warriors, Tricky, 808 State and the magnificent KLF to that.

Its stuff from these guys that goes missing when rap is being talked about - everyone harps on about 50 Cent, Eminem, and all the other toss that's parped out of our radios today. I know rap's not an easy thing to do, but why does the image have to be so full of, well, small dick syndrome?

Rap can be funny, soothing, and clever without being anyone's bi-atch.

fesrida, is backing up this idea about rap making people sound like idiots.

well i repeat whats already been said, any genre has its good and bad... in equal volumes pretty much except maybe classical, and once jazz. Jazz used to be a greater volume of good than bad, before that overprocessed smooth jazz BS came along. jazz fm, neuteured of musicality, and so packaged... raw musics always better... i like stuff thats done dry...

theres good blues out there... quite alot of it...

where i think the most reliable stuff is classical, mainly because of the cultural capital associated with it... although i actually spend far more of my time listening to jazz, funk, blues, soul, GOOD rap.

examples of the latter (that i know of) would be guru, gangstarr, the roots, us3, tribe called quest, dream warriors, avalanches, blackalicious...

you will generally find (currently) that if the masses listen to it, its crap. The only exception over recent years was Gil Scot's 'the bottle' which still seems to have an up to date groove, even after 25 years....


and that coming from a 16 year old, who by all logic should be into pop, homogenous hip-pop, and nu-metal....

JazzymanJJ

I'm totally with you on your choices. I'd recommend the compilations on the Hotel Costes and St. Germain du Pres Cafe series, if you haven't heard them yet.

The French seem to put out a lot of good cross-over music, and MC Solaar is legendary!

Welcome, all you new people. Good to have you here!

KP

I really like De La Soul, especially what they're putting out nowadays, and Tribe Called Quest .... Black-Eyed Peas, too.

When I think rap, I think hip-hop, and thats why I wouldnt come up with stuff like Tricky or 808 State, cos I dont think of that as hip-hop. KLF is funny ... anyone remember the Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu? ;-)

I like Blackalicious, The Roots, too - but not Guru or Us3.

I followed up the tips from around here while ago and liked what I found: MF Doom (Bells of Doom), Jedi Mind Tricks, more from Deltron 3030 (I only had a track or two before) ...

Applause by Square One was mentioned by someone here, and it really is a good track ... I also discovered Latyrx a while ago, like it ... funky.

French hip-hop is cool. Dunno anyone better than MC Solaar is, but there's lots of other stuff too ...

An old collection CD that I really dug at the time was Les Cool Sessions. Early 90s that, some really good tracks. Soundtrack from Yamakasi must be really good too - couldnt find it in the shop here, but remember the movie had some dope music running in the background.

And for very cool French-Arab rap, check out Intik. Got a track or two by Sniper that I like too.

What about African hip-hop? Y'all ever heard of Bisso na Bisso? They're brilliant!

And I bought Daara J's Boomerang, its got some good tracks too, check out Esperanza, Exodus and Paris Dakar, for example.

the klf was great, i've got most of the recordings, used to have a video but my 2nd last vcr chewed it up

iv only really heard one french/arab rap... that was a laurent de wilde track (a french rhodes player... like him alot <speaking as someone who wants to be the next influential pianist one day...)

Us3 are quite a bit better than guru i think. Each to his own though. Roots are one up again... and blackalicious , musically he ain't much (ie in terms of his backing) , but as a rapper...

thanks for the reccomendations... i already have the st germain one, and its pretty fly! Ill look into the other one but it might take a while- i dont have an income, and i just bought a headhunters cd, a gil scott heron one, and a few more laurent de wilde.... (aforementioned french rhodes player!)

how comes i dont get the warm welcome here...!

Warm welcome to JazzyMan ... <grins>

If you like the Costes cds and St Germain and so on, I'd bet you would really like the Buddha Bar cds too .. they're nice to chill by, or to get ready to go to a party by, or for some cocktail kinda thing ...

(not that I ever have a cocktail kinda thing ... thats probably why I (sadly) havent gotten round to playing these cds anymore lately! .)

There were also these Hedkandi CDs, do you like those? Or further back in time still, mid-nineties, the first coupla Rebirth of Cool CDs? Nice acid jazz stuff that got, very cool, good both to dance or to chill by.

What else, on dance music with hip-hop beats and a jazzy feel ... Alex Gopher is good, very good. Akasha had a good CD in that field too. And what about - but now I'm straying way into like, trip-hop/breakbeat/lounge territory, Nicolette? I love that Nicolette CD, Let Noone Live Rent-Free In Your Head.

Oh, bookmarked this webradio station a while ago, never really gotten round to listening to it, but it looks like its got a lot of stuff from that NuJazz/Hip-Hop/Lounge nexus: Couchsurfer.de.

My favourite webradio station is still dublab.com, tho ... its got that kind of music, its got more turntablist/abstract dj stuff too, but its also got, like, bouts of sixties jingle/jangle guitars or sensitive lo-fi, so it kinda goes into different directions, but its all equally interesting and soulful - and yeh, lot of abstract beats, too.

On an aside, whats with the word "lounge", like, loungy music, and how Americans and Europeans think it means different things, or have I got that right?

Over here it means (or meant - it became all the rage, like, few years ago, before the eighties retro trend swallowed everything up that is, tho the basic idea is still everpresent) ... lemme start that sentence over again -

over here it means like, cool, jazzy dance music, like where the old acid jazz style meets deep house, basically. St. Germain and those Costes and Buddha Bar cd's were the epitome of "lounge", as were the unavoidable Kruder & Dorfmeister. It goes (went) with this whole new scene - all these new places that sprang up looking like the chill-out area of some fancy club, all sofas, design beanbags and glass-top tables or whatnot, where thirty-somethings who were getting too old to actually still go clubbing (or had their newly-borns in their wide-tire design buggys with them), but didnt wanna lose the feel and had gotten into some money, would be able to have sushi while tapping their feet to the latest mellow beats, you know the thing? I think Americans call it, what, downtempo or something?

Cause according to A., in America "lounge music" means something totally different, like, moody musicians doing an alternative retake on the Sinatra-style nightclub singers - say, ehm ... ****, what are these guys called, always dressed in black? Tindersticks. Or like Cuba Las Vegas.

Can you people elucidate me on that? Is it a Europe vs America thing, or does it depend on where in Europe or America you are, or is it just ... frames of reference, like?

There's a duo over here, Thievery Corporation who's music was labeled in a review I'd read as "lounge-core . . . James Bond music for the jet-set crowd."

I think they're great. My fave album is The Mirror Conspiracy.

Yeh, Thievery Corporation would be my definition of lounge music ... not so hot on them, myself. Like the style of music, but no track of theirs ever really caught me. But if I come across that album I'll give it another spin!

the thievery corporation, rebirth of cool, hedkandi mixes are all good background dinner music